


Tap Dancing Platypuses (and other improbable things)

by Rehearsal_Dweller



Series: Little Towns in the Desert [2]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 04:39:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/961657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rehearsal_Dweller/pseuds/Rehearsal_Dweller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone should have known that the scientists would never leave well enough alone.<br/>Shortly after the radio hosts of the Route 800 Settlements got together for the first time, their scientists did the same.<br/>(The scientists, though squabbly and Carlos-blamey, generally get on a lot better than the radio hosts do, so they start working together a hell of a lot sooner than their more talkative partners.)</p>
<p>[The Little Towns-verse is based on the headcanon that Night Vale and Desert Bluffs aren't the only towns of their type along route 800. It's fun, it's cute, and it's a little bit absurd. Give it a shot!]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tap Dancing Platypuses (and other improbable things)

 It was Carlos's idea.

Well, it wasn't. It was actually _Javier's_ idea, but if anybody were to ask, the unspoken agreement amongst the collected scientists was 'blame Carlos.'

Even Carlos was kind of going along with it.

And anyway, if you trace it back far enough, it's really _Kevin's_ fault, but since he was the one who first asked Cecil out on what would later be classified as a hate-date retrospectively, but that might be a little _too_ far to justify placing blame. Plus, he wasn't actually there.

And it ended about as badly as expected, too.

Or, well, as badly as they _should_ have expected.

(Declan was unprepared, the others should have known better. Honestly.)

What did they do, you ask?

_Well_.

It was about three weeks after the local radio hosts from Night Vale, Desert Bluffs, Pine Cliff, Clear Hedge, Grand Meadow, and Placeville all “mysteriously disappeared” for seven hours.

For the record, none of them are particularly good liars.

This is relevant because they pretended, from the day the plan was made until the day they found out that the scientists were doing the same thing, that they weren't sneaking off to hang out with the other local radio hosts.

(The scientists, as a collective, are better at lying by a factor of 29.473. This is an objective, quantifiable fact, as proven one saturday afternoon when Carla and Declan were maybe a tiny bit tipsy and decided that it would be a good idea to science it. The lying thing. _That_.)

The whole thing had started with an email from Javier.

 

_My fellow R800 Scientists,_

_It took some serious googling to find you guys, for the record. All of the towns but Placeville have some interference protecting their citizens. I spent a good six hours trying to find an email for Carl Davis of Night Vale before realising that that wasn't Carlos's actual name. Sorry, bud. Night Vale's CC is_ good. _Or the SP, whatever._

_Anyway, as I'm sure you've all realised – assuming, of course, that your darling radio hosts are as clueless about secret-keeping as mine – that the Voices of our respective towns have been communicating for a while now. They met up a few weeks ago._

_It got me wondering. And while as a scientist wondering is something of a constant state of being, this is some wondering that I'd rather like to act on._

_Long, rambling email short: We should meet up._

  * _Javier of Grand Meadow_




 

Carlos responded first, which is obviously why the whole thing is his fault.

All.

His.

Fault.

Hear that, various secret (and not secret) polices of the R800 Settlements? _IT WAS CARLOS'S FAULT._

It probably wouldn't have been a problem that they were meeting up. Maybe a bit more problematic than the _radio hosts_ meeting up, because the scientists pay attention to things, but really nothing major.

Only they didn't meet up in town.

Any of the towns.

Or anywhere along Route 800.

For their first meeting, they snuck out to the nearest non-mirror town (although they wouldn't start referring to them as the mirror towns until later) and sat around at a coffeeshop swapping stories for six hours.

Unlike the “direct mirror” radio hosts, Carlos and Diego got along fine, and the same went for Carla and Dina. Actually, they all got on pretty well.

It was at the sixth meeting that they started looking into how and why their towns were so similar. And, more fascinatingly, how the six of _them_ had come to fit the pattern, even though five of them were transplants.

For some reason, they were being allowed to continue.

(For now, at least.)

The Hosts found out about the weekly science rendezvous sometime around the 8th meetup (sometime being an entirely accurate scientific term owing to the fact that for once it didn't happen in sync – Lawrence found out on tuesday, the direct mirrors all found out on thursday, and Cam was late again), at which point they finally admitted that they'd been meeting up themselves.

As if the scientists or various policing agencies didn't know.

Pssh.

“Do you think they know?” Dina asked, staring vaguely in the direction of her Night Valen counterpart.

“About the mirror thing?” Carla responded.

“Yeah,” said Dina.

“How could they not?” said Diego.

“Yeah, Ceci and Evelyn could be twins,” Carlos jumped in. “Same goes for Kevin and Cecil. They're observant enough to have noticed _that_.”

“They definitely do,” Javier commented. “I think it weirds Cam out.”

“Lawrence, too,” added Declan.

“That's not what I meant,” said Dina. “What I mean to say is do you think they _understand_?”

“Not likely.”

“'Specially since we hardly do and all.”

“You have a point.”

“Once we know, we can explain it to them.”

“Assuming that the Secret Polices – private security forces, non-secret polices, what have you – let us finish our research.”

“We've gotten this far, haven't we?”

“It almost feels like we're finishing somebody _else's_ experiment, honestly.”

“I've been thinking that, too. Night Vale as the control -”

“How do you know Night Vale's the control?”

“Because all of the other towns are variations on Night Vale's format. Clear Hedge is Night Vale with completely reversed genders. Desert Bluffs is Night Vale under corporate control, instead of governmental.”

“Pine Cliff is both of those variables together -”

“And Placeville is the same town format without the weird.”

“This can't be an old experiment,” Javier said. “This was set up for us.”

“How do you know?” five voices asked in near unison.

“Grand Meadow is a Night Vale where the radio host moved to town, but _I've_ lived there all my life,” he explained. “It can't be a coincidence that Cam got to town when you guys did.”

“ _Woah_.”

“But these towns are -”

“They've been around since -”

“ _Woah._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't explain it in the text of the story, but the fact that the Scientists call the R800 Settlements the mirror towns comes from two things:  
> 1) The explanation I've been giving for this 'verse that best sums it up is that the towns are all funhouse mirror reflections of each other  
> 2) The Mirrorverse from Star Trek  
> Anyway I know that this one was rambley and kind of self-contradictory, but I like it a lot. And I like the one I'm working on next even better. It's adorable. Shh.


End file.
